A week with us: A WP minor release and Gutenberg

The WordPress core team has been working on a variety of interesting projects over the past couple of weeks: Accessibility in the WordPress editor, a minor WordPress release (v6.0.1), improvements to blocks, a Style Engine in Gutenberg, and much more! In this blog post, we’ll share with you what each one of us has been up to! 

Our weekly updates

Andrea

Gutenberg

I continued exploring accessibility of the new features landed in Gutenberg and created a series of issues.

To improve accessibility knowledge in the project, I created an issue to extend the Accessibility ‘How-to’ in the Gutenberg documentation. So far, this documentation contains very little information. It would be great to provide contributors with some clear, short, information to answer their most common questions, doubts, requests for help, about accessibility patterns and best practices. This is meant to be an ongoing task.

• Fixed the ARIA role on the BoxControl component to avoid unnecessary ARIA landmarks. #42094
• Fixed missing labelling for the border radius range control. #42118
• Created a PR to make sure useFocusOnMount correctly sets initial focus on the first element. #42187
• Heading level menus: Fixed lack of semantic information about the selected level. #42273
• Created a PR to fix missing label and selected state semantics for the ‘Left to right’ toolbar menu. #42324
• Created a PR to fix mismatching visible text and aria-label when the ‘Show button text labels’ preference is enabled. #42359

Ari

Gutenberg Style Engine

These past couple of weeks I was mostly focused in the Gutenberg plugin, and more specifically the Style Engine.

The Style Engine is a new feature/API that aims to be a central repository for all inline styles in the next generation of WordPress. It’s an exciting prospect, so I’ve been working on the architecture of that API a lot.

So far we’ve built a Declarations object which will hold CSS properties like color: red; font-size: 1em and so on. This was already merged in #42043, so we are now thinking of the next steps in this engine.

I’m working on a Rules object, which will be able to match CSS selectors (like div.class-name) to Declarations objects. In addition to that, I’m building a Store object which will keep track of all the Rules and allow us to better process and optimize the styles output in the future (#42222).

Other tasks

Besides the Style Engine, I did a lot of code reviews in the Gutenberg repository, helping others push forward with their improvements.

I am also working on a draft post for Database Engines and the way we can use them in WordPress Core. This will be a long road, but I’m hoping we can do some good with this proposal in the future.

In addition to the above, we worked on reviewing some performance tickets in the WordPress Trac, and trying to figure out the major pain points.

Carolina

I have not worked full weeks the past two weeks but I have participated in the 6.1 early core ticket triage,
worked on updates for the TT1-Blocks theme, followed up on default theme issues in the WordPress Trac ticket system, and triage and testing for Gutenberg.

For Gutenberg I worked on the following:

• Add arrows to the post navigation link
• UI controls for the heading elements in the Styles panel
• Prevent the link panel from reloading anchor links in the editor
• Fix an issue with copy pasting formatted text into the file block
• Post date: Add option to display as the last modified date
• Add month and day as a suggested format to the date format picker
• Comment template: left, center and right alignments
• Opened and troubleshooted 3 new Gutenberg issues

I also worked on a pull request to disable drop cap when a paragraph is aligned. I ran into some problems with the logic I used in the attempts to make the code work for both LTR and RTL languages, and the pull request is not complete yet.

Sergey

WordPress 6.0.1

I was a Core Tech lead for WordPress 6.0.1. This is a maintenance release that features 31 bug fixes in both Core and the block editor. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they have already started the update process.

On the day of the release, some of the Core and Meta tasks I helped with included:

• Updating the Credits API
• Committing version bumps, running tests, building packages, enabling updates, etc.

If you’d like to learn more about the release process, these steps are documented in the WordPress Core handbook: Releasing Minor Versions.

WordPress 6.1

For the past two weeks I continued triaging and reviewing tickets for the next major release, WordPress 6.1, as part of my duties as a Core Committer.

I made forty-three commits to WordPress core, mostly various bug fixes and enhancements. I also led a meeting for new core contributors and triaged new tickets incoming into Trac (the bug tracking system that WordPress uses).